Articles / Resources

Co-Founder of ING Firm Jumps to NFP

00:00 01 February in In the News by rafferty

by Bruce Kelly and featured in Investment News February, 2007: New York - One of the founders of Financial Network Investment Corp., the largest independent-contractor broker-dealer in the ING Advisors Network Inc., walked out the door last month and joined NFP Securities Inc., leaving some observers to wonder how many registered representatives affiliated with FNIC eventually could follow. Jerry Brown, one of the seven partners who started FNIC of El Segundo, Calif., more than 23 years ago with Miles Gordon, was a regional director in Seattle for FNIC and ran one of the firm’s largest group of producing brokers and advisers. At one time, he had as many as 100 reps and advisers in his shop, industry observer said, with an office that generated between $15 million and $20 million in gross dealer...

AIG Advisor Group’s Makeover Gets OK

00:00 01 January in In the News by rafferty

by Bruce Kelly and featured in Investment News January, 2007: Industry observers and financial advisers are welcoming a series of management changes announced Tuesday by AIG Advisor Group Inc., which hopes the changes will lead to better services for advisers. The biggest change is that AIG has named Larry Roth to replace Peter Harbeck as chief executive. Mr. Harbeck remains the group’s chairman. AIG Advisor Group’s changes are seen as boding well for the network of broker-dealers. The changes signal that AIG Advisor Group’s management wants to “use the best ideas among the firms and spread them across the board to benefit everyone,” Mr. Henschen said. Mr. Roth joined AIG in January 2006, replacing Mark Goldberg as president and chief executive of Royal Alliance Associates Inc. of New York, the network’s largest broker-dealer. Mr. Roth’s promotion is one...

Waiter, There’s a Fly in My Soup! Looking for Nice People

00:00 01 January in Articles Written by Jon Henschen by rafferty

by Jonathan Henschen, CFS and featured in Broker-Dealer Journal January, 2007: A functional back-office that delivers good service to advisors must be nurtured by management. No matter how much they produce, advisors who are rude and condescending to support staff should be weeded out before setting a dangerously negative tone. Recently, I started a weekly 30-minute radio show through ProducersWeb.com interviewing broker/dealers. It wasn’t long before I discovered a reoccurring pattern among my guests. When asked what kinds of advisors they target, instead of “Advisory focus,” “Big producers” or “Financial planning Approach,” as I was expecting, their first reply is usually: “We want them to be nice!” But that focus made perfect sense the more I thought about it, since the alternative to “nice” can have dire effects on a firm’s back office, and...

Top 5 reasons advisors stay at BDs. Creating “Hooks” to improve retention

00:00 01 January in Articles Written by Jon Henschen by rafferty

by Jonathan Henschen, CFS and featured in Broker Dealer Journal January, 2007: Last year I wrote an article detailing the, “Top 5 Reasons Advisors Leave a Broker/Dealer.”  The more I researched the topic, the clearer the differences between advisors who move on and those who stay became. For advisors to consider changing broker/dealers, the pain threshold must be sufficiently high to motivate them to make that drastic move. Nonetheless, though many advisors have mixed emotions about their broker/dealers, usually ranging from disappointment to apathy, most stay on.  Why is that? I look at the reasons reps stay with broker/dealers in fishing terms (can’t help myself; I live in Minnesota!).  That is, I see these reasons as “hooks” holding advisors to their firms.  The more hooks a firm has in its reps, the less...